How to Find Unpaid Invoices and Easily Follow Up in QBO

Hello, everyone. Today I am going to show you how to track your unpaid invoices. And then I will also give you some insights on how to manage those invoices. My name is Ronica Canham. I am a CPA and a CFA and the founder of Montreal Financial, where you can find lots of resources for small businesses, finance, accounting and Canadian tax. Okay, so first of all, let us go to our sales tab on the left hand side and we'll just click on the sales tab and you'll see up here there's several menu options. The menu option that I'm interested in are the invoices. And here you can get a sense of the invoices that have not been paid. And the Sherlock Holmes Detective Agency actually has many, many unpaid voices, which is terrible, but we are going to try and fix that. Okay, so first of all, we want a report of all our unpaid invoices. We can simply look here and we can see that there are a bunch of unpaid invoices. I have sorted this by status. You can also sort by date, you can by number, and you can also filter by unpaid. So this view now really only has the unpaid invoices. And then you can go into each one and look at the details and make a plan as to what to do the other way to get a report on your unpaid invoices. And there are basically three ways. This is the first way you can actually export this report, but by going to reports, which we are going to do now. And if you scroll down under who owes you, there is actually a report that is open invoices. So we're going to click on that report and here you will see the details of all of the unpaid invoices. And you can see adversary company in this case, they owe Sherlock Holmes quite a bit of money. And the other customers that also owe them. You have the date, you have the type of entry into the system, the terms, the location, and you can actually customize this in various ways. So first of all, you can collapse everything. So this way you just have a total for each customer and you might want to collapse it since you might need a management report or something that is just more summarized. The other options here you could switch the classic view, this is what I am more used to, and it gives you this report. You can export this report to Excel if you want to do some calculations on who owes what, or by dates. And you can actually customize it in various ways so you can change your columns. And here are the options for the different columns. So you could Put in the customer, for example. So sometimes I like to put in the customer if I want to export the report, because that way I have the customer on every line item and it gives me more options in Excel or Google Sheets to manipulate the report. Additionally, you can put a sales rep name if you have sales rep set up and see how many unpaid invoices relating to a sales rep. Or if you want to give someone.

A mission to go out and collect on the unpaid invoices. And you have various other options here as well. You can filter by customer, for example. So say you just want to see adversary company. You can do that if you have a location set. You can also use that terms due date. All of this is helpful in terms of filtering your report. And you can also change what the report looks like. You could have the logo on top of the report if you want, if you're planning to give it to someone or if you want to professionalize it. So let's run report. And you'll see here now that adversary company appears as a customer. That's one of the changes we made. And we have all of these other fields, but again, you can add fields, and here as well, you can add fields to the report. So you have two areas. So I might want a phone number because I'm going to be giving this report to an admin person. And so I'm going to put the phone number there. You might want the discount terms, sales reps. Again, this could all be reflected. And if I just click outside of this, it'll update the report. You'll see we don't really have any of that information entered into the invoice, but it's great if, especially if it helps you in terms of collecting it. So on the invoice itself itself, you could enter these terms. Okay, so that's the open invoices report. And finally, if you export it to Excel, you can, as mentioned, manipulate this data a little bit more.

Report on it.

The third way to see what your customers owe you, and this is the most conventional way from an accounting perspective, is to go to reports and to go to your Accounts Receivable Aging summary, which is always under Favorites and is also under who owes you. So if you click on the Accounts Receivable Aging summary, it will show you everything that your customers owe you and it'll tell you how overdue they are. So anything that is 91 days and over is actually something that should be followed up much sooner than, for example, something that is only 30 days overdue. So in other Words you would devote your resources to trying to collect the 91 days and over. You can also expand on this report by simply clicking on the total. And here you will have a list of the invoices by the due dates. And so again you can simply just export this report, take out the 91 days or more and then use it for whatever your follow up methodology is. You might want to call them or you might want to email them and or you might just want to assign it to a third party.

Additionally, you still have these column options. So and this is, this gear is always super useful to add columns to your report. So again we have the sales rep, we have the similar options to the other reports. You could put the outstanding tax amount, the sales taxes, it's always interesting to see that and that may have some impact on how much you have paid but not collected. So and the difference between this report and the open invoices report that we just looked at is this one is an aging report, a detailed aging report. So it gives you all of the invoices for the different customers by the aging date and it also gives you an accounts receivable AR in accounting parlance for all of the customers. And this again is very useful. This should be part of your month end procedures. You should be looking at this. If you do have invoices on credit to customers, you want to review this at least once a month, if not more often to make sure that you are receiving your payments. Okay, so now I'm just going to give you one more tip on following up with your customers. So if you go to your invoices over here and if you look at the little dropdown here, you can actually send a reminder. And this is super useful. It looks like it's coming from your accounting system, so it's not that aggressive. It's basically you can customize this message however you want, but the standard, the default messages, we're sending a reminder to let you know, blah blah blah, it's not been paid. If you already pay this invoice or have any questions, let us know. Have a great day. So again, super polite, this could be the first follow up and then if you have to do future follow ups, they may not be as polite. That's up to you. And you can certainly customize this message. But again, it's a great and super easy way you could go through as you're doing your monthly procedures. You could simply just click on all of these invoices individually click on send reminder and and then you are just going to make sure that you have your email address in here and then click on Send.

So this concludes our tutorial on how to see your open invoices, how to pull up reports, the open invoices report and or the Accounts Receivable Aging summary, and finally, how to send a reminder for your overdue invoices super easily. So I hope this was useful. If you have any questions, don't hesitate. And actually, I would love to hear your comments. And please like and subscribe. I'll see you next time. Have a great day.